There is a bird bath by our
back door, and in the evening the wildlife come to drink. It’s like a Serengeti
waterhole, with finches, a squirrel or two, and the chipmunks in lieu of
ostriches, wildebeest, and gazelles. There is even a lion-equivalent, albeit
behind the glass: the cat Telemann, who creeps and skulks and lashes his tail and
then hurls himself against the glass, sure that this time he’ll get lucky.
The squirrels long ago
figured out the nature and role of glass doors, and they pass this knowledge
down to their children, who ignore the gray beast and continue with their
drinking. The chipmunks are more skittish, but they’re slowly learning to
ignore Telemann’s attacks.
Chipmunks, even full-grown
ones, exude baby charm, with their big heads, tiny noses, and widely spaced
eyes. Elegant stripes of black, cream, and gray run the length of their bodies,
as if they had been carved from some richly veined wood. From my COVID cloister,
I spend a lot of time watching chipmunks, and as anyone knows who has looked closely,
in order to draw it, at a leaf or a sleeping cat, the attentive gaze sooner or
later ensnares the heart.
The Franciscan Richard Rohr
says that “we must love something deeply to know its soul.” So if looking leads
to loving, and loving leads to knowledge of another’s soul, I should, with luck,
before autumn come to know something of the chipmunk‘s soul. But what can a
chipmunk’s soul, its essence, possibly be like? How can I, a lumbering giantess
by comparison, understand the quicksilver brevity of a chipmunk?
Wittgenstein said that if a
lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him. But he was talking about
understanding as an intellectual process. I’m
talking about knowledge and understanding as an action of the heart, prompted
by love--the kind of knowledge that Saint Francis had of the birds and of the
wolf of Gubbio. The kind of understanding that Robert Burns had of the mouse
whose nest he accidentally broke up with his plow. The kind of knowledge of
our brother primates that rewarded Jane Goodall’s patient gaze.
As the summer unspools, I attend
to the chipmunks, and wait to see what arises. The trouble is, they’re so quick
that they’re usually just a blur, so to supplement my practice I looked at a
couple of chipmunk videos on YouTube.
One of them showed a mother
chipmunk who had made her nest inside what looked like the hollow leg of a
horizontal aluminum ladder. The end was covered by a piece of metal with a hole
in the middle. Her thumb-sized baby was old enough to crawl out of that hole, but,
in her opinion, not old enough to spend the night outside.
She opened her mouth wide, picked
him up around the middle, and tried to stuff him sideways into the hole, but he
was too big. She put him down and picked him up by the hip, but he still didn’t
fit. He needed to go in nose-first, the way he had come out, but she couldn’t
manage it.
It was getting dark, and she
was frantic to get him back inside and put him to bed. He would have none of it. With the
foolish invulnerability of the young, whenever she loosened her grip he would
move away, twitching his tail and staring out at the wide, green, new world. She tried
showing him by example. She went into the hole and then stuck out her head
saying, see how it’s done? But he would ignore her and she would jump out and pick
him up again.
I watched the four minute video in an agony of maternal empathy. Here before my
eyes the eternal drama of the generations was being played out: the young struggling to get out and get away, and the old pleading, Wait! It’s not safe! You’re not
ready yet!
The chipmunks outside my
window move too quickly for me to grasp their soul. But that
mother chipmunk was speaking my language, and her words echoed in my heart.
